They find a man dead in the front row of theater number four. It’s impossible to know exactly how long he’s been there. State of the body suggests hours rather than days. The high school kid at the ticket counter swears the man paid cash for Don’t You Wanna, the Jefferson Airplane biopic, but that’s theater number seven. Should’ve gone there, is the conventional wisdom. He might still be alive. Others think he probably did go there. Don’t You Wanna first and then theater number four second, and it was an old-fashioned double feature. He looked the type, everyone says, probably because he was a fifty-something man. Thin. Glasses. Geeky looking motherfucker you want the truth, maybe even a little creepy, and he probably didn’t have anything better to do than see The Killing Crown, which was at least going to be quiet. Lowest-grossing film of the last two weeks (not to mention YTD). Management was about to replace it. The plot involved an eco-terrorist who shot an oil company CEO and then went on the lam. Inspired by a true story, they said. But the cops caught the killer twenty minutes in. The critics called this a classic bait and switch. The killer was at a Burger King. Eating a Whopper and wearing one of them children’s birthday crowns, and the arresting officer knocked it off his head with a night stick and made some wise-ass remark. It’s a tiara in prison, asshole. Or, checkmate, bitch, and then the film smash cuts to the fast-food employee smart enough to pick up the crown. We see it on his mantel. The guy looks like the high school ticket seller, all his friends say so. The crown is preserved for years, surviving two moves, a divorce, and an attempted heist, and then the guy sells it. He’s in his fifties by then. Says it’s time. The CEO killer has died in prison. Conspiracies everywhere. The guy prides himself on reading the American market, and so he makes his move. Six million dollars. He insists on collecting it in cash. The final shot is most reminiscent of Scrooge McDuck, and then it’s all hip-hop beats and roll the fucking credits.
They’re not rolling when they wheel the dead guy out of the theater, though. The screen has gone black. Management leaves number four empty for three days, out of respect, and then, when it reopens, they put a documentary in there. Something about public education. They expect no one will show up, but, here we go, first screening and bam, the place is packed. To the gills. It’s two in the afternoon. On a Wednesday. Everybody wants a piece of this story, which has become regional news, and there’s even a fight over the actual seat of death. End of that first row. Punches are thrown. Management puts one of them reserved placards up, and that seems to calm things a bit. It’s fitting, people agree. Reserved for the ghost, reserved it stays, and years go by. Regional news becomes national news. Tourism magazines write features. People make pilgrimages. Management decides they could charge a whole separate admission fee just to see this seat, and they make plans to move it to a more commercial location, but these plans are short-lived. They end up selling the seat, actually. Private buyer. Affiliated with Fastenal, which is the biggest company you’ve never heard of, and it’s one of them offers you cannot refuse. The sale is widely reported and trending. Undisclosed amount. Then, the night before the buyer is due to take possession of the seat, it goes missing. An electric drill and several screws sit in its place, and none of them contain any DNA or fingerprints.
There’s a prolonged search. There are interrogations. Extensive social media surveillance leads to the breaking down of three private residential doors and the supervised entering of a self-storage unit off Hwy 61, all to no avail. Nothing is found. The seat is gone.
It only turns up in a photograph. Taken in New Orleans six months later. The seat is on fire at a popular Mardi Gras spot, this place where the ashes of local loved ones are dumped into the terminus of the Mississippi. The photograph is sent to Fastenal. To the Winona 7. It’s distributed on flyers all along the riverfront and in the residential valleys, and the town understands. They look at each other with wheels turning. Heads moving. This thing was floated down the river, they know. It must have washed ashore in dozens of places, and, always, someone was there to send it back into the current, to push it toward points further south. Crime, protest, life, it’s all just a symphony of interconnected cooperation, and this here is a note of comfort. This is a note of terror. The glances in the theater and at the Hy-Vee, in the dorms and across the barrooms, they’re filled with pride and disgust. We are in this together, they say, these downcast and winking eyes. Everyone is possibly suspect. The world as naked and raging accomplice.
Brett Biebel is the author of three collections of flash fiction (48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock). His most recent book is A Mason & Dixon Companion (University of Georgia Press, 2024). He lives, teaches, and writes on the banks of the Mississippi River, in Moline, IL.